Page authors

Home

What is Nuclear/Particle Physics?

The strong nuclear interaction is responsible for binding the smallest nuclear particles, quarks, into composite particles called hadrons. Hadrons are grouped into two categories:

Baryons - nuclear particles with three quarks. The most common examples are protons and neutrons.

Mesons - nuclear particles with two quarks or more precisely a quark and an anti-quarks. The lightest of the mesons are the pions, with masses about 7 to 8 times smaller than a proton.

The quarks come in six flavors: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. Quarks also carry a nuclear charge called color. There are three color charges labelled red, blue, and green. There are also color anti-charges of anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green.

A hadron must be color neutral by containing quarks with all three colors or by quark/anti-quark pairs that give a total color charge of zero.

What is CMENP?

The Canisius Medium Energy Nuclear Physics (CMENP) is a research group in the Department of Physics at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. The group consists of Dr. Michael Wood and a team of undergraduate students.

The goal of the group is to conduct cutting-edge research of the behavior of quarks in hadrons. Currently, our research is divided into two projects:

Modification of hadrons in the nuclear medium - we know that hadrons are made up of quarks. A lot of our knowledge about the properties of hadrons has come from studying reactions of the hadrons produced from a proton. Our group is investigating whether those hadronic properties will change when the hadron is inside of a nucleus. Does the cloud of quarks that make up the nucleus alter the mass, width, and interactions of the hadrons as they traverse the nucleus? Specifically, we are studying the behavior of the long-lived mesons, like the neutral kaon, in heavy nuclei, such as Fe and Pb.

Quark Confinement and Hadronization - quark confinement is the explanation of why we do not observe free quarks. At cold temperature, like those in an atomic nucleus, the quarks condense into protons and neutrons. When a quark is liberated from a proton, the energy released by the nuclear bonds creates quarks and anti-quarks from the vacuum. This mix of quarks will produce a proton and a new hadron. This process of forming color-neutral hadrons from free quarks is called hadronization. Our group is investigating quantitatively the hadronization of massive mesons like the omega and the f1.

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab)

The group conducts research at JLab, a Department of Energy (DOE)
laboratory in Newport News, VA. The lab consists of an electron
accelerator and three experimental halls (A, B, and C). The accelerator
is two linear accelerators (linacs) connected to two sets of
recirculating arcs. This arrangement allows for electron beam energies
from 500 MeV to almost 6 GeV. More information can be found here.

Presently, the DOE is upgrading the accelerator in order to double the maximum beam energy to 12 GeV. This energy upgrade will expand the range of available hadrons to include the charm quark. The lab will also expand by adding a fourth experimental hall (D). The existing halls will upgrade their detector systems to take advantage of the expanded kinematics.

The CMENP group is involved with experiments in Hall B. Hall B contains a photon tagger to allow for both electron and photon
beams. Also, the hall contains the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer
(CLAS). The CLAS is a set of six identical particle spectrometers in a
ball shape with an almost 4-pi acceptance. The detector system contains
drift chambers for position measurements, time-of-flight for velocity
determinations, electromagnetic calorimeters for energy measurements,
and Cherenkov counters for electron/pion discrimination. The CLAS is
ideal for studies with multi-particle decays.

For the 12 GeV upgrade, the CLAS detector will be augmented to
accommodate the forward direction of the produced particles. The new
detector configuration is called CLAS12 and will have a number of new
components. One new component is the Pre-shower Calorimeter (PCAL). The original electromagnetic calorimeters (EC)
will be part of CLAS12 but do not have the resolution to distinguish
such reactions as the decay of a neutral pion into two photons. To
increase the resolution, the PCAL will be placed in front of the EC.
The CMENP group is responsible for adding PCAL to GEMC, the GEANT4 detector simulation, and for writing the PCAL data reconstruction software.

More information about the activities of the CMENP group and JLab can be found in the sidebar.

Abbey Physics

Abbey Physics is an
introductory Physics textbook aimed at the high school student. The
motivation behind the book is to provide an introduction to the subject
that is mathematically rigorous while at the same time strips out a lot
of the clutter in a standard textbook.
These things are expensive glossy pictures and topics like rotational
motion. This book has been used in paper form at St. Anselm's
Abbey School, a private, Catholic high school in northeast Washington,
D.C., where one author (Dr. Herbert Wood) has taught since 1986. In
2013, we converted it into ebook form and are offering it on Apple's
iBookstore for a nominal fee. Follow this link to the bookstore. The ISBN is 978-1-62847-263-9. We hope
you enjoy it and learn some Physics.